hjkar wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 01:08:While I generally dislike EA and David DeMartini came off as a bit of an ass in the interview. I do think steam sales cause people to devalue games much like piracy does. One can argue the sales try to profit on the fact that the value of games are already devalued due to piracy but I believe it also perpetuates a lower value. The cost of making games risen but the prices haven't, contrary to most other industries. I recall being a child and buying a new copy of Secret of Evermore for the SNES for 74.99$. That was just the plain game, no collectors edition. Using a simple inflation calculator I could expect to pay 113.05$ for the game assuming inflation of 2.44%. If the average price of a big company game was 50$ in 1995 then it would be 75.37$ now.

The price is wrong, Bob! Seeing as there are no real numbers on piracy you can't claim it devalues shit. And piracy does not equate to a lost sale. If piracy were impossible it doesn't mean people would be buying the games they pirate. How these publishers can cry poverty when something like COD does a billion in sales in just over 2 weeks only shows how laughable this arguement is. Fact is, for most games, most people find them to be drastically overpriced at $50-$60 which is why they wait for for them to hit the $20 or less point. And as others have pointed out the sheer volume of sales at a lower price point makes up for it anyway. So long as you're turning a profit instead of a loss, who cares? The problem with assholes like DeMartini is they're just greedy and feel that a 100% return isn't good enough and they should be making at least 300%+ ROIs. Steam and gamers aren't the problem here.

“That's it. You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!”